Home______Enlightenment Gene?

As a meme, the culture for enlightenment is perpetuated through generations. As a gene, the biological capacity for it does not fare as well. People take to the idea of becoming enlightened but those who experience it are rare. This is because a gene for it does not contribute to evolutionary survival value.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Self-Transcendence, Brain Cancer, NDEs, & Consciousness

Raise the index finger on your right hand. There, that was easy, wasn't it? You just told the finger to lift and it did. Now I have something not so easy, a question. How did the finger get raised? You did it, you tell me. Sorry, but that's not good enough.

Andy Clark & Extended Mind

Some of his points:

As our use of technology increases, we are hard put to say the world stops there and the person begins here.

Chaos Theory and Avalanches: Your Brain Is Like A Pile of Sand

So you think your thoughts, you say? Well, if you do, what will you think thirty seconds from now? One minute from now? One hour? Where is this thinker you claim yourself to be?

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter has a vivid recollection of a pig's head on a table in a market. As a teenager he could see the severed neck that once had lines of communication with the body, that had once connected all the outposts of information with the headquarters in consciousness. He asked, "Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there?

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Consciousness, & Linguistic Place Holders*

Born in Czechoslovakia, in 1931 Kurt Gödel demonstrated that some propositions could not be mathematically proven true or false using the rules and axioms within a given mathematical system. Outside it, the system could be proved or disproved, but by doing so you would only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements.

So what?, you ask. Only this.

Of Selves and Cars

In the 1 January 2006 article below, John Allen Paulos asserts that a major shift in society and culture would occur once the public widely understood that the self is non-existent. That is one view of the self. Only one.

The Self Is A Conceptual Chimera

John Allen Paulos says this about the self: "Doubt that a supernatural being exists is banal, but the more radical doubt that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle" and "Oscar," is my candidate for Dangerous Idea.

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality is the term for a view of the world as not two, but one—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead a subjective experience in which the perceiver and the perceived participate with one another in a sense, according to some experiencers, that all is part of incessant movement, a dance, so to speak.

David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness

Although called the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes became challenged in the last century for the split he created between body and mind, the mind-body dualism, or subject and object. For him, body became one thing; mind, another. This presents a problem. Why? Hold out your hand. Open the fist. Now close it. How did the gap get bridged between your hand, the object, and mind, the subject, if the two are split?